Abby Lee Miller has cancer.
Though she is reportedly getting her affairs in order in case her cancer proves to be terminal, she’s fighting it.
A new report sheds some light on how that is going.
A source tells People the details of Abby Lee Miller’s cancer battle as she remains in the hospital.
“She is undergoing chemo and has good days and bad days.”
If you know someone who has undergone chemotherapy for cancer or for any other ailment, you know how hard that can be on a person.
“But overall she’s staying optimistic and looking forward.”
That is so good to hear.
Not only for her personal mental and emotional wellness, but because there seems to be corollary between optimism and defeating certain types of cancer.
Abby Lee Miller was diagnosed with cancer only a short time after leaving prison for a halfway house.
She went in for spinal surgery for what doctors had initially believed would be some sort of infection that was causing paralysis.
Instead, she was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma, a kind of non-Hodgkins lymphoma more commonly found in children than in adults.
Among children, the fast-spreading cancer has about a 90% recovery rate.
However, among adults, the odds of beating back the cancer are said to be somewhat lower.
Miller shared this graphic photo from her surgery.
This wince-worthy photo, taken post-op, came from Miller’s five-hour multi-level laminectomy back in April.
A laminectomy involves removing the back of vertebrae in the spine in order to access the spinal cord itself.
That alone was bad enough to contemplate without the added horror of a cancer diagnosis.
The news that cancer is fast-spreading is frightening for obvious reasons.
The good news, however, is that fast-spreading cancer like Burkitt lymphoma tend to respond more rapidly to treatments like chemo.
Miller spoke out after her cancer diagnosis without addressing her cancer directly.
With the former Dance Moms star, it has been one thing after another.
She served most of her sentence for bankruptcy fraud in prison, though the court did allow her to serve her time a relatively short distance from her California home.
While in prison, she lost a tremendous amount of weight thanks to weight loss surgery that she had undergone prior to her incarceration.
She was then released — after an unexpected delay — to a halfway house to serve out the remainder of her sentence.
She is scheduled to be released from there on May 25.
Though it is unknown at this time, it is expected that her time spent in the hospital will count towards her sentence and that, whether she’s still in the hospital or not, she will be freed on May 25 as scheduled.
But one can never be certain.
Abby Lee Miller did not do much to gain people’s sympathy while she starred on Dance Moms.
Though she certainly attracted plenty of fans, some others saw her as a bully who essentially terrorized children for a living.
There was a certain level of schadenfreude when it was announced that she would be sent to prison. That’s fine.
But let us be clear: no one deserves to have cancer. Our hearts go out to Miller and to her friends and loved ones during this time.
We wish her a full and speedy recovery.
